Today's Opinions

This week, our so-called one percent is made up not of an economic group but of those Kentuckians who are not incorrigibly immersed in college basketball.

Are you thinking of anything other than Saturday’s big game in New Orleans? Can you wait? Breath bated? Bets down? Pride bursting? Have family gatherings, civic events and, oh, nuptials and funerals fallen off your Super Doppler?

To heck with Florida vs. the United States Department of Health and Human Services. This is UK vs. UofL in the NCAA semifinals.

Every year since 1985 there has been an ongoing argument after UofL and UK play in the regular season. "They don't want to play ‘Us’ now," "I wish we could play ‘Them’ now," or "We are so much better ‘now’ than we were back in December!"

We were concerned to hear that an F1 tornado touched down in Shelby County on Friday, but we were terrified to learn later that residents in some pockets of the county didn’t hear storm sirens and weren’t warned of a dangerous weather system that was approaching.

Shelby County Emergency Management Agency Director Paul Whitman said the sirens were sounded when a surprising siege of funnel clouds were spotted by radar moving east from Jefferson County around 2:30 p.m.

One of those clouds had descended near Jeffersontown and done significant damage.

Odd things happen all the time. That it was 80 degrees on the last day of winter this week comes to mind.

Along these lines, every week Sports Illustratedincludes in its magazine an item titled “This Week’s Sign that the Apocalypse is Upon Us,” which highlights things that have happened in the world that are somewhat odd or even bizarre in nature.

Basically, they are things that make you scratch your head and say, “If that is going on, the end of the world must be near.”

Spring fever is supposed to arrive early in March, when you see the first robin, the bright yellow of an occasional daffodil, things green, abud and, well, warming.

Spring fever is not supposed to be a full-blown summer sweat at the strike of the vernal equinox.

It’s not as if there isn’t always plenty to talk about with basketball, politics, religion, economics, basketball, politics and, I don’t know, movies, but today we have to talk about the weather, because everyone is.

“Grading procedures do not reflect today’s teaching standards,” said Thomas R. Guskey from the University of Kentucky at a recent training session for principals in Shelby County. He could prove his point with a 1917 report card that belonged to his grandmother, which looked pretty much like a report card issued today.

He and Lee Ann Jung, also from UK, shared their expertise in standards-based grading for Shelby County Public Schools because we have completed a study of their book, Grading Exceptional and Struggling Learners.